Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died today, September 8, at Balmoral. Her funeral will be a celebration of a great lady, the very embodiment of mettle.

The queen of England might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would. Elizabeth II had lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class.

The queen had been working quietly (and often thanklessly) for the English people for over seven decades. Elizabeth Windsor was but 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first official radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated “from Britain to America, Canada and elsewhere.” Still in her teens, Elizabeth joined the military, “where,” according to Wikipedia, “she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”

This is precisely what the George Bush girls ought to have done in Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t. Both the queen’s grandsons have shown more mettle than most members of America’s pampered political dynasties. I may not share these young men’s version of duty and patriotism, but I can, nevertheless, appreciate what it takes. William worked as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot.

Before marrying that dolt from Tinseltown—Meghan Markle, who imagined she was a match for the queen of England—young Prince Harry had served in Afghanistan, and wore his Afghanistan Campaign medals on his brother’s wedding day. By contrast, in 2010, young Barbara Bush graduated as a royal pain in the behind: She assumed her official duties as spokesperson for Obama’s health care plan.

If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) and the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent. This thesis is anatomized in Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, by libertarian political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In his seminal work, Hoppe provides ample support—historical and analytical—for democracy’s inferiority as compared to monarchy:

… democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.

‘[I]n light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,’ explains Hoppe. ‘From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.’

The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes during his tenure in office. It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons’ staff to have vandalized the White House on the eve of their departure. Besides, the democratic political transient has learned that he can trust court historians and assorted hagiographers to re-write history favorably for him.

Pat Buchanan captured the rival perspectives—the despot’s vs. the king’s—in the following anecdote: “Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, ‘The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.’”

From pundits on our side of the pond, however, the monarchy regularly draws nasty barbs. Trashing the British monarchy appears to be their way of asserting American exceptionalism. I wager that were the conservative, periwigged Englishmen who founded America to pounce back on to the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” TV set—the only place they’d be welcomed, given their “Ultra MAGA” bent—the founders, too, would favor the monarchy over the current American mobocracy.

Whereas the British queen’s role had become purely ceremonial—life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lastly, consider the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the tawdry, quintessentially American saga they had inflicted on the queen. That the British monarchy stands for the last vestiges of ancient English tradition is not in dispute. But what do the Americanized Harry Windsor, formerly known as Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle represent? The Economist magazine, whose sources crown Meghan Markle as the “principal agent of the current debacle,” tethers “Harry and Meghan to … Marx”:

Markle, the Economist ventures, is a “product of an entertainment business that has done more than any other industry to fulfill Marx’s prediction that ‘all that is sacred’ would be ‘profaned’ and ‘all that is solid’ would ‘melt into air.’”

The Communist Manifesto predicted and celebrated that crass commercialism would subject national institutions “to the revolutionary logic of the global market.” “The Sussexes,” mused the Economist’s “Bagehot” column, “are … embracing capitalism in its rawest, most modern form: global rather than national, virtual rather than solid, driven, by its ineluctable logic, to constantly produce new fads and fashions.” [Emphasis added.]

Bar Marxist celebrity Meghan Markle from the funeral of the consummate public servant, HM the Queen, a true-blue “Sussex Royal.”

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 8
Unz Review, September 8
Free Life: For Life, Liberty And Property, September 9
The New American, September 9

* Screen pic image via Sean Gabb.

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“A Woman Of The Right: The Person Vs. The Polemicist” is a medley of recent videos. Or, as my editor puts it (he’s funny), “Ilana Mercer explains why some claim she ‘eats nails for breakfast’” I don’t, of course.

Hello patriots. This is an introduction to those new to my YouTube channel—and my work. My name is ilana mercer. I’ve written a paleolibertarian weekly column for two decades, in which firmly held first principles and a reality-based analysis have combined to yield a predictive bit of writing (fun, too) on the most controversial and pressing issues of the day. From war to race to trade deficits to anarchism to immigration to populism; as a valued reader put it, “We’ve learned to trust you.”

For 21 years these first principles have been applied to the day’s events with verve, vim and a good deal of muscular style. Alas, as an English letter writer to London’s Times Literary Supplement once put it, “Mercer eats nails for breakfast.”

This doesn’t always sit well with me. I had never imagined people would think a writer is an ogre simply because she uses the English language as it was once meant to be used, with deadly precision. (Have they read our American Antifederalists?) But, that’s my written work. The pleasant surprise element comes in here, where the person, not the prose, gets to make an appearance.

Another reader framed the muscular style less pejoratively: “A few years ago I said you wrote like a man. … Well now I think you also think like one.”

Since no woman wants to be thought of as a man on all fronts, I’m happy for the chance to appear occasionally in person to introduce my work to you.

Said a former—and formative—editor of mine from the Canadian press. “In your columns, you’re a take-no-prisoner demon,” in your videos, you are gentle and composed, your demeanor proper enough to be conversing with the Queen.”

Here I am more ilana the person than ilana the polemicist.

As to my views. I’m a libertarian of the hard-right. Lots of libertarians refer to themselves as neither left nor right. I’ve never done so. I’m a woman of the Right. Yet another clever reader put it thus: She’s so Right (as in right-wing) that she’s Left. That is as it should be. Certainly, before Trump, my typically Old Right anti-war position got me called a lefty by neoconservative readers and editors.

Another facet of my thinking that elicits the same “lefty” pejorative is that I’m never party-centric. Seeking immutable truth, in a postmodern environment, in which truth is devalued and rendered relative and subjective, demands transcending crass, opportunistic, party politics.
Self-evident truths are axiomatic truths, propositions that cannot be denied when squared with the reality around us. Reality is my guide.

I like to say that reality is the rational man’s anchor and that the strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. My own ideas are intricately tethered to reality, which is likely why they have stood the test of time.

As mentioned, I’ve burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against Uncle Sam’s wars of aggression. Wage Walls, Not Wars, I like to say. Indeed, I have always been as resolutely against America’s open borders as I am against her sanctimonious poisonous spreading of democracy around the world by prosecuting illegal, immoral, un-constitutional wars of aggression all over.

The motto on my eponymous website is “Verbal Swordplay for Civilization.” Nevertheless, I’m not squeamish. The Jewish sages–who were, ironically, pacifists in exile for 2000 years–counselled: “He who rises to kill thee—you rise a little earlier to … .” The viewers can complete the sentence. I have to mind the Deep Tech overlords.

Finally, why do I call myself a paleolibertarianism, and this is my idiosyncratic take: It’s how I’ve applied certain principles week-in, week-out, for years. In my definition, a paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which other foundational libertarian principles, by which all decent people should live, won’t endure.

This is precisely the reason for the institutional rot around us—where liberty and citizen sovereignty are crumbling as fast as our buildings: By central-planner design, America has been turned into a territory for trade, and nothing more. It is no longer a nation. Other than commerce and consumption, the glue, the fellow-feeling, that bind us together has been dissolved by DC design over decades.

But there is life after politics. And this is where I come in.

1. “On First Principles, The Person Vs. The Polemicist, And Life After Politics”

2. “Conservatives MUST Recognize Aggregate Group Differences While Cherishing The Individual”

3. “The Controlled Opposition: Candace On Tucker Is Wrong About The Riot & Rut Crowd” (Or, “The Democrats Ate Their Homework Argument”)

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‘The proper aim of education [was] to make virtue habitual’— Leonard Roy Frank, my friend & editor of Random House Webster’s Quotationary ~ilana

Ecumenical submission to heavily promoted second-handers is not in me. Picking the brains of longtime, marginalized, prolific, independent dissidents will not become a pattern on my watch ~ilana

In his 2004 foreword to my book Broad Sides, Peter Brimelow, the man who penned everything there is to say about America’s immigration disaster, in 1996, wrote this:

“… somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on … personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas.”

In this tradition, on February 6, 2017, I wrote a column titled, “Are Liberals Turned-On By Turning The Other (Gluteus Maximus) Cheek?” In it, I expressed the kind of—dare I say?—outsized idea that has animated my writing for 21 years.

To quote:

“The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward The Other, while readily accusing others like it of the same. It’s as though liberal men derive homo-erotic pleasure from bowing-and-scraping to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making.”

As so often is the case, I was the only one to have been tickled pink by that insight. I found it so utterly cheeky that I ran the column again in April 27, 2018, for WND, under the more prosaic title, “Are liberal pervs sexually obsessed with refugees?”

The case to have elicited my Freudian flourish—and boy, was Freud a fabulous and fabulist writer—had to do with, as I put it, “The repulsive specter of [a Western male] just about turning the other cheek to [an African refugee-rapist] who had spread both his cheeks.”

I promptly shredded Douglas Murray’s banal, humdrum observations (“Stockholm syndrome”), about the case under discussion, and offered up my own.

To repeat:

“It’s as though [egalitarians, of the left and the political right] derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making. Could it be that liberal men are driven by a powerful homo-erotic impulsive?”

The theme of WASPs acting out in sexual-submission really jelled in “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America,” featured on American Greatness, and published first by WND, June 11, 2020.

The column described the “Kneeling Ninnies”—those who lay down for the Black Lives Matter thugs, during last year’s BLM riots. These were “men, cops too, who knelt down like girls, instead of standing tall like men for law and order”:

“…men in uniform all collapsed to the pavements like yogis to the command of their black tormentors. One after another. … The forces, police and paramilitary, all squatted like sissies.”

With a link to the original idea in the earlier column, I broadened the category of flagellants:

“It’s almost as though WASPs get a homo-erotic sexual charge out of prostrating themselves in front of The Evil Other.”

Tying the pleasures of sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling and ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other: This is an idiosyncratic idea—my own.

But what do you know? I wasn’t the only one enamored of my generally woefully underappreciated ideas.

On May 17, 2021, on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Pedro Gonzales, a new writer, fingered the submissive response to the BLM rioting and general meekness of police and punditry as a form of “psycho-sexual ethnomasocism.” He said (2:58 minutes into the TV broadcast):

“I’ve characterized it as a kind of psychosexual enthomasocism.”

“Homo-erotic submission” (Mercer); “psycho-sexual enthomasocism” (Gonzales): potato, potahto.

“Mental telepathy”? Yeah, right.

“Ethnomasochism,” of course, came into use via Patrick J. Buchanan. The term is from Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

John Derbyshire does the properly honest linguistic forensics: “The earliest usage in a book that I am aware of is in Pat Buchanan’s 2011 Suicide of a Superpower.” However, ventures Derbyshire, Pat was preceded by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

One might convincingly—and charitably—argue that “ethnomasochism” as a term has come into common use.

However, a term (“ethnomasochism”) is not an idea (the “homo-erotic submission of WASPs to The Other”). An idea is “a mental representation that is the product of creative imagination.” In other words, it is a more intricate concept that bears the originator’s intellectual footprint.

Again, tying pleasurable sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling and ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other is an idiosyncratic idea. Like it or not (a lot of men don’t like it)—it originates in an oeuvre festooned with such audacious insights, made over 21 years.

I cringe as I write this, and other, forced, first-person accounts. Duly, in “The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian (April, 2016),” I told my readers how the use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. “To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is, count the number of times he deploys the Imperial ‘I’ on the page. Abuse ‘I’ only when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story.”

The second is my reason here.

My knowledge of my own works, well over a thousand, excluding books, is near-photographic; the idiom, the expressions, the way of thinking. So, the ears perked-up at another stray, but familiar, quip on twitter:

Pedro Gonzales, April 29, 2021:

“I regret to inform you that the absolute top priority of the conservative movement and the GOP today is assuring Americans that Democrats are the real racists.”

I shot back:

Mr. Gonzales, “That is my verbatim, 2013 description of the GOP ‘silly tit-for-tat’ argumentation“: “…Democrats are the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the liberator of [African-Americans]. We’re against abortion and welfare because we love [African-Americans].”

The mocking phrase “Democrats are the real racists”—as part of my methodical critique of GOP argumentation—is from “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist,” published on May 16, 2014, but repeated many times in my work.

Ecumenical submission to heavily promoted second-handers is not in me. Picking the brains of longtime, marginalized, prolific, independent dissidents will not become a pattern on my watch.

Speaking of a pattern: The “Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage,” made recently by Gonzales, was first made by Ron Unz, editor of The Unz Review, for which I write. From a conservative stance, Mr. Unz blazed that intellectual trail. Myself, I would have acknowledged those who went before. It is the habit of a scholarly and fair mind.

Jack Kerwick, whose specialty is moral philosophy and ethics, made the following point:

While it is true that I was unfamiliar with Pedro Gonzalez, I was indeed acquainted with the idea for which he argued on Tucker’s program. And this, I was quickly reminded, is because the idea originated with Ilana Mercer, who advanced it for the first time a few years ago! She defended this thesis once more last summer in the midst of the BLM riots that visited billions of dollars worth of damage on legions of American cities.

Of course, it is possible for intelligent, thinking people to independently arrive at the same [insights]. This idea, though, is not one of them, for no one, but Ilana, has so much as floated it, let alone defended it.

While it is good that Pedro was given the opportunity to express Ilana’s brilliant insight on Tucker’s massive platform, he should’ve given credit to the person who first birthed and nurtured it. He could’ve then elaborated upon it, as Ilana herself did in her articles on the subject. … it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to explore, revise, and expand the ideas of others, to explore their nuances, their contours, and utilize them for the purposes of illuminating new circumstances.

But not before crediting The Originator.

*Image credit here

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, May 20
Unz Review, May 20
Quarterly Review, May 24

The post The Moral Writer’s First Commandment: Cite Your Sources! appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Dr. Seuss book-burning gave a guest on Tucker Carlson’s eponymous show the giggles: “It’s total distraction from the real issues,” claimed one Chadwick Moore. So wrong.

Come to think of it, our much-loved TV host’s defense of the purged Dr. Seuss books fell short of freedom’s standards: “Dr. Seuss was not a racist” was the gist of it.

But before deconstructing Tucker’s defeatist and defensive argument—here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, for lack of a better word.

The New York Times reports that, “Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery.”

None other than Dr. Seuss Enterprises, “the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator,” “had decided last year to end publication and licensing of” the following titles:

• And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937)
• If I Ran the Zoo (1950)
• McElligot’s Pool
• On Beyond Zebra!
• Scrambled Eggs Super!
• The Cat’s Quizzer

These custodians of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s work simply rolled over. They conceded to cancelling their own books after consulting with the educational idiocrasy.

It took panels of ponderous oafs to conclude that the “whimsical stories [that] have entertained millions of children and adults worldwide” “revealed strong racial undertones.”

Some parents were aflutter, too.

The following headline perfectly captures the “wussification“—that fretful melding of “wimps” and “p-ssies,” en masse—that makes for a Wussy Nation:

“Parents grapple with racist images in Dr. Seuss books.”

Grown-ups “grapple” with things like, let’s see, food and medicine shortages; with the fact that the educational idiocracy that is depriving kids of the literary canon has failed to teach them to read, write and speak English properly.

Or, picture this: Video footage of Kamala Harris being swallowed whole by a python has surfaced. She is being subjected to the crushing peristaltic movements of the giant reptile, as he digests her. You “grapple” with that:

To pull or to publish these ostensibly upsetting images? That is the question. (Adult-humor alert for Wussy Nation.)

But grownups do not “grapple” with Dr. Seuss content!

Tucker’s mistake was his contents-driven defense of these kiddie books:

“Dr. Seuss was not a racist. He was an evangelist against bigotry,” pleaded Tucker. “He wrote an entire shelf of books against racism, and not in a subtle way. They were clearly, explicitly against racism. That was the whole point of writing them, to teach children not to be racist.”

Yawn.

Even if Dr. Seuss was the pedagogic, sanctimonious bore Tucker makes him out to be—actual racism in the targeted literature should be a peripheral issue, or no issue at all.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not content.

Whether he intended it or not, the premise of Tucker’s defense of Dr. Seuss is that if we do detect “legitimate” racism in literature—there is a case for banning it. (Now, Tucker might not have meant it that way, but this is what the structure of his argument portends.)

By contrast, freedom makes the case for an unfettered free market in ideas, good and bad. Freedom argues for politically impolite books to be published and read freely.

Banning books, moreover, assumes a lack of choice and agency among individual human beings. It’s also predicated on a higher authority that decides for the rest of us which cultural products are fit for our consumption.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing not over the contents of Mein Kampf or McElligot’s Pool, but for their publication irrespective of their content.

Which is why I say freedom’s argument is an argument from process, and not content.

Mein Kampf, and any offensive literature, needs to be available in a free society to free men and women who want it. And not because of history; so that we don’t forget it or repeat it.

Alas, in the face of the cancellation of people and publications, cancelled conservatives just keep these logically weak and, frankly, loser mea culpas coming. Like the Argument from Hitler, which is a kind of “WhatAboutism”:

“Amazon and eBay sell Mein Kampf, why not Dr. Seuss? I want what Hitler got, Amazon and eBay. Me too. Boo-hoo.”

Tweeted “Musil Protégé”: “Conservatives [inadvertently] condone presentism. As Audrey says in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that our world judged by the standards of Jane Austen’s time would (look ridiculous)?’”

Most great literature doesn’t meet the sub-intelligent standards of the woke illiterati, who control the intellectual means of production—the schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), the press, publishing houses, think tanks, Deep Tech and the Deep State.

In some of the axed Dr. Seuss books, the typically cartoonish illustrations exaggerate the physical characteristics of a “Chinaman” and one or two African islanders. You know, just the kind of characteristics that, once-upon-a-time, made books about faraway places and people so exciting to kids.

Much of the Western literary canon—indisputably the greatest works of literature ever—is guaranteed to violate woke racial dogma.

Yet, even by Wokepedia’s telling, “Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist.”

What next? Shall we ban Shakespeare for Othello and Shylock?

YouTube: “The Wussification Of The West: Shall We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock?”

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 11
Townhall.com, March 12
American Greatness, March 14
Unz Review, March 11
CNSNews.com  March 13
Quarterly Review, March 7
American Renaissance, March 12

The post The Wussification Of The West: Will We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action has become emblematic of the times we’re living through. Its “thesis” for theft “argues” that looting is “joyous” and can produce “community cohesion.”

Shortly before the mad-hatter media became hip to the socially redeeming aspects of looting, I briefly blogged, on August 28, about In Defense of Looting not imagining it would become such a hit.

The reason for this early mention was the Economist. The news magazine—read religiously—had dignified author Vicky Osterweil’s argument from criminality, calling it “a live debate,” which is good English for, “We need to have a conversation.”

These usually smart people wrote:

A few radical activists, including some associated with Black Lives Matter in Chicago, argued that looting can be legitimate. One woman, protesting at a police station that held arrested looters, called it a form of ‘reparations’ for white oppression.
… Vicky Osterweil, author of ‘In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action,’ published this month, sets out the same argument at book length. Looting by the poor, black or otherwise repressed is a radical tactic that brings welcome change, in her view. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations are too easily ignored, whereas ‘riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.’ The shared experience of looting can also be ‘joyous,’ produce ‘community cohesion,’ count as a small act of ‘direct redistribution of wealth’ and, she reckons, does little harm to those who have insurance. She thinks it also leads people to question high levels of inequality.

To go by Vicky Osterweil’s argument: If looting a man’s property is morally legitimate—it ‘does little harm to those who have insurance’—why not taking his life? Doesn’t he have life insurance?

When will murder be likewise mitigated with the same degenerate logic? For the specimen we’ve witnessed foaming at the mouth and in the faces of the police the act of murder fits on the same continuum of affirmation.

Not to appear as though they were prejudice about the perks of pelf and pillage, the Economist countered with judgment-free utilitarian economics:

[Osterweil’s] claims are unconvincing. Those who snatched swag from Gucci or Louis Vuitton in order to sell them on hardly share her anti-capitalist views. Nor is it clear that looting spreads solidarity in poor neighborhoods. The grandmother of the man shot by police condemned the looting. Ms. Osterweil might be right, however, that residents of poor areas, who rarely even set foot in the wealthy central parts of their city, are fed up. Looting is not a helpful way to respond, but the resentment at this disparity is real enough …

Here, the Economist joins the menagerie of morons that is the American media in considering and dignifying Osterweil’s political pornography.

Her considered readers were, however, on to her.

Late in August, In Defense of Looting still had all but two rotten reader-reviews on Amazon:

1. “Poorly written, poorly reasoned.” One star.
2. “Garbage: terrible ideas and a terrible book.” One star.

Yet it had a rather good Amazon rank. How, you wonder? The rank was likely not market-generated, but due to the corrupt enterprise of university book-buying. State subsidized university libraries have enormous budgets for indoctrination. Just as the colleges have abandoned their duty to educate, so too have publishing giants long since betrayed their mandate to publish quality books. These conglomerate quislings collude to ensure that a lot of dough is forked out for a lot of drek.

Down to its libraries, the American university is a corrupt enterprise. You’ll find “The joys of looting” safely ensconced at the Harvard Book Store, and likely other “elite” schools across the country.

China might control thinking on its campuses, but can you imagine the Chinese Communist Party instructing its apparatchiks to promote material meant to make the next generation thieving, dumb and decadent? Unlikely, considering that the Chinese have a wicked work ethic, low-crime rates and that criminality is severely punished.

Since that blog post, the book has become the toast of the towns not yet burned down by the putrefying left. Its author, Ms. Osterweil, a welcomed guest on many “probing” programs, presumably to explain her “provocative” “thesis” of theft.

Indeed, we inhabit a culture in which high-brow polemics are banned and banished from the public square by grubby, low-brow, social engineers, from Facebook functionaries to the once-august “Publishers Weekly”: It dubbed Osterweil’s debut a “bracing rethink” of something or another.

A new kind of Kafka confronts any author whose thoughts veer from those of the mono-cultural mainstream. Books that enlighten never see the light of day or are digitally burned by the Amazon monopoly; pamphleteers that dim debate find publishers and “respectable” reviewers.

Happily, however, Amazon reviewers were having none of the looter lady, who, mind you, merely “identifies as a woman,” which is not the same as being a woman (in my non-expert opinion). They have not reconsidered their “bracing” views about Osterweil’s immoral enterprise. These book reviews are a riot of hashtags like #violence, #steal, #stupid, #vicky, #waste:

I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because, while it is empty headed garbage, it was a bargain since I shoplifted it.
Since Amazon doesn’t have a physical bookstore from which I can steal this book, will they please implement a virtual looting option? One star.
Sam says 1.0 out of 5 stars: “Garbage: terrible ideas and a terrible book.”

Understated, yet “Astounded” gives In Defense of Looting 1.0 out of 5 stars, writing, charitably, that it “seems rather shallow and malevolent.”

If you think these Amazon reviews are the work of Russian trolls acting for Trump, “Century Rider” provides a corrective cue: “Want another 4 years of Trump?”, writes the reviewer on August 29. “This is the kind of ‘reasoning’ that will get Trump re-elected.”

Clearly, the restoration of law and order and the reverence for private property rights are the most powerful principles with which to unite main-street America, left and right, in the ramp-up to the November election. This is what Republicans must remember, before they scamper down the judicial rabbit hole of abortion.

As to the book: Here’s the true disgrace of In Defense Of Looting: someone read the book, endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs. Now people are reviewing it.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 25
Unz Review, September 25
Quarterly Review, September 28
Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens, September 26

The post Law And Order Unites Main Street America (Or, ‘In Defense of Looting’) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Racism is a lot of things. One thing it is not:

A white child, aged five, executed by a black man with a shot to the head, as the tyke rode his bike. Ask the cultural cognoscenti. They’ll tell you: That’s never racism.

Otherwise, almost anything involving the perpetually aggrieved black community counts as racism.

Students hoist a “thin blue line” flag in solidarity with police: racism.

A black male is asked for his driver’s license: racism. Of course it’s systemic. Are you stupid, or something?

A white politician proclaims that “all lives matter”: Come again? Are you kidding me?!

A museum curator fails to commit to the exclusion of the art of white men, including, presumably, the Old Masters: not racism; white supremacism. Be gone with you, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

A black student struggles with English grammar. English grammar is ruled racist. Take that, Dr. Johnson!

This, even though, logically, it is more likely that our student is not up to the task or hasn’t tried hard enough; that his tutor is not up to the task and hasn’t tried hard enough—or all of those things combined.

As you can see, accusations of racism are seldom grounded in reason or reality.

Racism, then, is just about anything other than the point-blank execution of little Cannon Hinnant (white), on August 9, by Darius Sessoms (black), and the rape, the other day, by Dejon Dejor Lynn, 25, of an old lady: his 96-year-old neighbor.

From the media industry’s modus operandi, we may comfortably deduce that the raped lady is almost certainly white.

How so?

Fully 73 percent of the residents of Ann Arbor, Michigan, are white. If the race of an unnamed victim of black crime is withheld, she’s most likely white. Were the victim Hispanic, the media industry would say so, and would forthwith withhold the picture and race of the “suspect,” so that the crime became an attack against a “minority.”

Similar black-on-white atrocities are a daily occurrence, documented, “in moving images,” by “the fearless and indefatigable journalist Colin Flaherty.” They are either ignored by the media industry or described as racially neutral.

In a powerful responsorial that is almost religious in cadence, Jack Kerwick, a FrontPageMag.com columnist and occasional American Greatness contributor, commands us to “say their names”:

David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired African-American police captain and family man. Say his name.

Paul and Lidia Marino, a couple in their mid-80s. Say their names!

Wendy Martinez: Say her name.

Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla: Teenagers tortured and murdered. Say their names.

Karina Vetrano: Attacked, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death while jogging. Say her name.

Phil Trenary: Treasury of the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis who was trying to rejuvenate the city’s economic life. Say his name.

Scott Brooks; Sebastian Dvorak; Serge Fournier; Tessa Majors; Dorothy Dow; Lorne Ahrens; Brent Thompson; Michael Krol; Patrick Zamarripa.

Say their names. (“Remembering the Victims of Black Violence – Black and White,” By Jack Kerwick)

The prototypical American victims of racial hatred were 21-year-old Channon Christian and 23-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom, of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Their slaughter, in 2007, was dismissed as a garden-variety murder and rape. But there is no finessing the white-hot racial hatred seared into their mangled, white bodies.

Read the description of the crime in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, and pray tell how white America can thus forsake its children by accepting the racial innocence of their defilers:

Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused “by the tearing,” or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash. White trash. (pp. 35-36)

The object of hate is so often a remarkably beautiful woman or man. It is as if the aim is to forever obliterate perceived beauty unattainable.

On the Dark Continent, the same dynamic was in play when “Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.” There,

… tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. The Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—had always been resented by the Hutus. The tall, imposing Tutsis, whose facial features the lovely supermodel Iman instantiates, had dominated them on-and-off since the 15th Century. On a deeper level, contends Keith Richburg, an African-American journalist, the Hutus were “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.” (Into the Cannibal’s Pot, p. 43)

Such was the murder of Tyler Wingate, “a 24-year-old man from Berkley [who] was brutally beaten to death after a seemingly minor car crash on Detroit’s west side [in July of 2019]. The crash and beating were caught on surveillance video from a nearby gas station.” (The Unz Review)

Undeniably, it is a kind of race-based annihilation of beauty unattainable, for that is certainly what poor Tyler Wingate was blessed with.

For America to have incorporated and assimilated the unreason of “racism” on such a self-immolating scale, as American society has done, is to be mired in self-contradiction. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in self-contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

This is where American society finds itself: less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

Patriots, please quit the “rest in peace” platitudes. Cannon Hinnant, Tyler Wingate and all the rest rage, rage from the grave.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 13
American Greatness, August 17
Unz Review, August 13
Quarterly Review, August 18
The Saker, August 14
American Renaissance, August 14
Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens, August 14

The post America’s Race Reality: Inhuman, Insane, Incoherent appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and the consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his.

Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history are unsurpassed.

How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot?

He can’t: He should, but he can’t.

Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.

How can Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth.

Not for nothing did one wag say that the history of ideas is the history of words. And since Mencken was, first and foremost, a man of ideas (and hence, words)—no discussion of Mencken and his ideas is complete without a reference to English, the language he deployed with such verve and vim.

Thus, when “a few newspaper smarties protested” Mencken’s verbal virtuosity, Mencken tartly noted, in his Preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949): “Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives … are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses. Let them … leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.”

Written at a considerable level of abstraction, for a prosaic people that, by Mencken’s estimation, “cannot grasp an abstraction,” a Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer and editor nowadays. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.

Indeed, ideas are in retreat; and the incremental and steady “closing of the American mind” is on the march. By virtue of the unsettling, bracing originality of his ideas, Mencken is rendered as inaccessible to the American reader as an alien from deep space.

While Mencken’s libertarian acolytes and admirers focus on his disdain for The State as the leitmotif of his writings—Mencken’s war on the “dishonest, insane, intolerable and tyrannical” U.S. government was, arguably, the least controversial thread in his voluminous oeuvre.

Mencken’s grasp of government as a predatory, “regimenting” force that fleeces the citizen without flinching; that could and does “safely strip [the individual] to his hide”; a “gang well-nigh immune to punishment”—these, nowadays, are the most acceptable of Mencken’s thoughts.

What would make Mencken an outcast to the turgid minds dominating the current marketplace of ideas is his disdain for the “intellectually underprivileged” American electorate, whom he called the “boobs.” As Mencken saw it, Boobus Americanus, so easily and reliably “impressed and enchanted” by the political scoundrels, was largely to blame for why nowhere in the world was government more secure than in the United States. Americans were simply the “most timorous, sniveling, poltroonsish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag …”

“A glorious commonwealth of morons,” Mencken called America. “The American moron’s mind”—this “mob-man’s” mentality—is that of a “violent nationalist and patriot,” to whom ideas are a menace, and who would always opt “to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights.”

These are all Mencken’s words, not mine.

It was Mencken against America, then, to paraphrase the scholar Thomas W. Hazlett. And it would be Mencken against America today.

More so than his anti-statism and strong, spare prose—so different from today’s insipid, anemic, meandering commentary—Mencken shattered every conceivable totem and taboo of American life. It is this so-called anti-Americanism that would make Mencken unpalatable and unemployable in our times.

In a word, being a man of ideas is what would render Mencken a misfit among his countrymen. For, as Mencken saw them, Americans were congenitally and “implacably hostile to” the very things that made him tick: “novel ideas and points of view.” “Everything American,” mocked Mencken, is characterized by “a great distrust of ideas” … and “a harsh fidelity to a few fixed beliefs,” most of which Mencken derided.

Let me count the ways.

American exceptionalism? Not on your life—except as the “greatest show on earth … a show which lays chief stress upon … the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues … clowns in constant practice.”

“American values”? Aren’t those fit for export? Should not America be making the world over in its image?

Are you fit to be tied? Mencken’s conviction was that the “average American” is a narrow-minded chauvinist, who is wont to conflate “differentness” with “wrongness” and immorality. By extension, America’s habitual manner of dealing with “foreign nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable.”

Christianity? Not too long ago, gingerly cleaving to Edward Gibbon’s scholarship, this essayist pondered whether Christianity might be considered the Social Justice movement of its day. How subtle was that compared to Mencken’s reference to Christianity as a “mob religion” that “paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i.e., with money”!

Nevertheless, in his day, Mencken was seen as merely following his métier as an acidic critic; today, his heretical words on most subjects would have earned Mencken a rebuke from a prissy, Fox-empaneled gaggle of schoolmarms, called upon to expatiate about Mean Man Mencken. On second thought, today, Mencken would have been silenced by “cancel culture.”

Mencken’s views on “monogamous marriage” and the military broke the American mold as well.

The married man ends up “making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the everyday sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaise and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blackened.” Find me a conservative radio mouth or TV anchor who would forgive the Maestro for that uproariously funny quip.

The American military? The “military caste,” bemoaned Mencken, in the Minority Report, did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.” More crucially, Mencken mocked the mighty American military’s fighting prowess. Who gets away with that today?

From the riffs of outrage coming from the Democrats and their demos over “our democracy” betrayed, infiltrated, even destroyed—you’d never know that a rich vein of thinking in opposition to democracy runs through Western intellectual thought. It’s at its best in Mencken’s diatribe against the democratic doxology. Mencken was withering about a political dispensation that teaches that “all moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided in the inferior four-fifths of mankind.”

Of course, Mencken was not merely politically impolite or incorrect. Rather, he pulverized every politically protected group conceivable: soldiers, sainted farmers and their subsidies, Jewish money-lenders, blacks, and Anglo-Saxons. Mencken would have infuriated with this verdict about the Anglo-Saxon: He is “the least civilized of white men and the least capable of true civilization.” His blood is “running thin,” and “he fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.”

Rest assured, too, that for his use of racial epithets, the country’s professional racism-spotters would proceed against Mencken with all their sinecured mediocrity. This, even though, by the Baltimore Sun’s telling, Mencken did “more to help black writers—including the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson—get into mainstream print than any other white magazine editor of his day.”

Yes, Mencken helped all talent. Why so? For one, he was secure in his own talent unmatched. For another, Mencken toiled at a time when merit still mattered. Today, however, true talent is expunged—treated as a mortal threat to the gatekeepers and overlords of our slum-dog culture. Only in America, ventured Mencken, are such “third-rate men” in full control of the state and the “Kulture.” More so than in Mencken’s day, the mission of these “third-rate men,” today, is to preserve the status quo by warding off “the menace of ideas.”

In Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray evaluates and assesses the events and the individuals, from 800 B.C. to 1950, to have inspired humanity and dragged it out of wattle-and-daub hovels. His verdict about cultural products in the “post-1950 West”: Hardly any of “the literature, music, and visual arts of the last half century has enough substance to satisfy, over time.”

Murray’s methodologically sound findings jibe with the case made here. It is that Mencken—whose career as an American man-of-letters was meteoric, and who made a good living regaling and enraging every segment of American society—would have perished in penury had he peddled his craft in the culturally more barren half of the 20th century.

Not prone to hyperpartisan hysteria, this writer sees Mencken as the keenest and cleverest observer of American culture. Whereas Mencken marshalled exciting, irreverent and powerful thoughts and arguments; current commentary, by-and-large, serves up self-righteous, “pious piffle,” to quote Mencken on the cultural foot-and-mouth of his time. Right and Left, these “dull fellows” would rise on their hind legs in protest of Mencken’s systematic, analytical and entertaining evisceration of the alpha-and-omega of American life.

Were Mencken to submit a tract to most of the popular magazines or websites, conservative or liberal, he’d have been reprimanded by a millennial or Generation-Z “editor” for being mean-spirited. He would have been told, “Thanks, but no thanks, Henry. We’ll pass.”

And “Henry” would have replied to editorial detractors as he did back in the day: Your newspaper, young pipsqueak, is “trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair. It is full of transparent absurdities. Its editorials are ignorant and without sense. It is written in English full of clichés and vulgarities—English that would disgrace a manager of prize-fighters or a county superintendent of schools.”

Amen.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 2
American Greatness, June 29
Unz Review, June 25
Quarterly Review, July 5
The Agonist, July 1
Chronicles Magazine, March Issue
The New American, April 29, 2022

The post H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Following the show of incompetence at the Democratic Iowa caucus, columns on competence proliferated. One stood out for its ineptness: “Make America Competent Again” by David French at the Dispatch.

Mr. French is an attorney and decorated Iraq War veteran, who was prominent among National Review’s “Against Trump” writers.

Back in June of 2016, when the anti-Trump cabal was engaged in a political blood sport as degrading as dwarf tossing—Mr. French came into focus as the object of neoconservative Bill Kristol’s fantasies.

To wit, never Trumpsters like Kristol imagined that from the ashes of the Republican primaries would rise a man to stand for president against the victor, Donald J. Trump. This Sisyphean task had been attempted and failed by 17 other worthies.

One of the political dwarfs tossed at Donald Trump by the aforementioned Mr. Kristol was Mr. French, who is vested in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, and is a tool of democratic internationalism.

The first sign of incompetence in “Make America Competent Again” is that the column is hopelessly littered with the Imperial “I”:

“I THOUGHT—after federal officials let Jeffrey Epstein kill himself in prison—that I COULD no longer be shocked by incompetence. Yet, HERE I AM, the day after the Iowa caucuses, shocked again.   … If you follow MY WRITING at all, you know that I THINK that …  As I TYPE this newsletter …”  On and on.

This amounts to a big fat epistolary selfie.

Entitled “The French Press,” French’s blog would be better called “I, David.” The reference is to I, Claudius (1934), an historical novel about the Roman Emperor Claudius. Written “in the form of an autobiography,” I, Claudius was turned into an award-winning television series.” (Which this writer watched as a child growing up in … Israel. That’s what once passed for kiddie entertainment!)

In any event, the use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. To get a sense of just how bad someone’s writing is, count the number of times he defers to himself solipsistically on the page. The late, sphinxly Charles Krauthammer, who wrote a tight column, considered a single “I” in a piece to be a failure.

The Imperial “I” is fine when you’re a Roman emperor, or when the writer has earned the right to rhetorical self-absorption, due to his relevance to the story. That excuse does not obtain in the case of the French puffery.

The promiscuous use of the first-person should be considered as bad as the ghastly catchphrase, “I feel like,” which prefaces every sentence spoken by a millennial.

Mr. French is doubly diminished when he declares:

“If you follow MY WRITING at all, you know that I THINK that policy is far less consequential to American life than culture.”

Oh, the sins we commit when we omit. Naturally enough, strong, competent writers credit those who inspire them; they don’t crib from them.

Mr. French, on the other hand, appears to take a bow for a philosophical bent that belongs to classical conservatism: “The culture is upstream from politics.” Or, as Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, put it, “At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.”

Relinquish the ego. Quit letting your reptilian brain lead you, and allow, in a sentence or two, that the stuff “I THINK” in “MY WRITING,” to parrot Mr. French, belongs to a proud conservative tradition.

That tradition might need revision. For the world, political and cultural, has changed, metaphysically.

Although a man of the left, Canadian columnist Rick Salutin had, without doubt, advanced astute observations about the relationship between culture and politics. Because they comport with the metaphysical changes alluded to, Salutin’s observations are the better ones.

Back in 1998, Salutin offered up a prescient, if distressing, view of politics as culture, following “the capitulation of most sources of opposition to the neoconservative … agenda.”

Wrote Salutin: “In a culture of imagery and spectacle, politics has become mostly a show, entertainment.”

“[F]or the moment, politics in the democratic, electoral sense, is no longer about making choices [left or right] regarding social and economic direction.”

“What’s increasingly clear to voters is that they are not choosing the direction of their society—that has already been settled; they are voting for a cast of characters who will play the role of The Government on television and on [Capitol Hill] for the next [couple of] years.The scrip is set, but you get to decide who plays the parts on TV.”

If Deep State durability has proven anything, it is that not even a fire-breathing political dragon like our president can fumigate the snake pit that is the Permanent State.

Neoconservatives like David French and the attendant ideology they promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming and “cancelling” of deviationists, conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—these are in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

That’s politics qua culture

**
See Part 2: “No Pardon for Neocon War Crimes”

©2020 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
WND.COM
February 13

The post Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State (Part 1) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The happening featured beefcake Donald Trump Jr. and bimbo Kimberly Guilfoyle.

The couple was on stage at UCLA to promote the president’s son’s “book,” when they were jeered by dissident Deplorables for shutting down the Question-and-Answer segment.

“Book” here is in quotations to denote “so-called,” because the staple, ghost-written political pablum, penned by ambitious political flotsam, relates to literacy as H. L. Mencken relates to conformity—not at all.

Predictably, Guilfoyle opted out of the conversational give-and-take demanded by her man’s hecklers, and went straight for the groin:

“I bet you engage in online dating, because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.”

Why “predictably”? Well, a supple mind may not be one of Guilfoyle’s assets.

Kimberley’s cerebral alacrity was seldom showcased when seated in Fox News’ legs chair. During one of her last televised appearances on “The Five,” a Fox News daytime show, Guilfoyle protested that, “the U.S. has already reduced its [toxic] ‘admissions’ enough.”

I give you Guilfoyle, verbatim, in her own words: “So, we can keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep reducing our admissions. …”

To Make English Great Again, you reduce emissions, not “admissions.”

For a while, it even seemed that Trump, looking for curve appeal in a press secretary, was going for Guilfoyle. She certainly thought so and said as much, implying, at the time, that she herself is “a great communicator … with deep knowledge.”

And no; I do not digress. This all goes to the Guilfoyle’s knee-jerk, flirty, aim-for-the-groin reaction to her hombre’s hecklers.

Tellingly, the taunting of Donald Jr. by dissident Deplorables was covered very differently by the American Daily Beast and the British Guardian.

Descriptions of political positions and personalities were prefaced by the Daily Beast with “edifying” editorializing. The hecklers the Beast described as “fringe-right.” Their alleged instigator and inspiration was said to be “a white nationalist.” Perfectly legitimate demands from this disgruntled audience for a “Q&A” and for “America First,” the Daily Beast deemed tantamount to a right-wing insurrection or civil war.

Discrediting dissent is all in a day’s work for the American press.

What do you know? The hecklers at Trump Jr.’s book-flogging were also known, to the Daily Beast at least, as “Holocaust deniers.” As far as this reader can tell, the group taunting the empty suits on stage for refusing to answer questions had said not a word about the Holocaust. Nor had the disrupters been interviewed by the Daily Beast about their views on the Holocaust.

More to the point: Why is participation in our democracy predicated on one’s views on the Holocaust? What the hell does an individual’s opinion about that topic have to do with his right to solicit answers from members of Donald Trump’s politically active dynasty? I say this as a Jew whose family tree was truncated by the industrial-scale mass murder of millions of Jews that was the Holocaust.

Perhaps the Daily Beast is of the Daily Northwestern’s school of journalism. The Daily Northwestern, a campus Newspaper, had recently said “no” to fact-gathering if this, apparently archaic, journalistic practice proved too unsettling to campus snowflakes.

Yes, Deplorables who aren’t dittoheads have dared to question The Donald.

Many a Deplorable, among them Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, has refused the ditto-head designation. Instead, these dissenters perceive President Trump and his unelected emissaries as reneging on doable promises to build a wall, to place a moratorium on legal immigration, and put the United States and its long-suffering people first.

But to the Daily Beast, these positions are reason to libel those who hold them as awful, Israel-averse anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Trump voters inquiring about campaign promises hitherto unkept were wrapping “racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic messaging” in the raiment of Trumpism, we were told. (My paraphrase. Beast journos can’t write.)

Contrast the Daily Beast’s emotive, ad hominem laced invective with coverage of the same event by The Guardian, a British daily newspaper.

It was not racists who “drowned out” Trump Jr. and his paramour, but “diehard Make America Great Again conservatives,” reported The Guardian.

It was not the adjudication of the Holocaust that these “hostile conservatives” were demanding, but the need for a “Q and A! Q and A!”

The fury of the “fringe group” was not white-hot racism, but that “of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration is captive to a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.”

There was a “factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right,” reasoned the Guardian,” intelligently, quipping further that hardly any “triggered” left-wingers were present to “clamor for Trump Jr’s silence.”

In other words, by skedaddling, rather than staying to face the music, the president’s son, ventured The Guardian, had sundered his own case that it was he who was “willing to engage in dialogue, but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech.”

And, OMG! Contra the new, woke journalistic credo established by the Daily Northwestern; The Guardian interviewed two dissenters and published their pungent criticism, namely that “the pro-Trump movement was being infected with ‘fake conservatism’ and that the president himself was at the mercy of a cabal of deep state operatives who wouldn’t let him do many of the things he campaigned on”:

“We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.” Not a word about the Holocaust.

As for Donald Trump Jr. and his gal pal Guilfoyle: Dumb in isolation—worse in combination.

* Image via The Quarterly Review

©2019 ILANA MERCER
Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, WND.COM
November 14 & 21

The post Is Political Participation Predicated On Views About Holocaust? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.—ILANA MERCER

The particular CNN segment I was watching concerned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. It was meant to help terminate the controversial anchor’s career. I recognized the sourpuss, dressed in marigold yellow, who was presiding over the seek-and-destroy mission, targeting the ultra-conservative Mr. Carlson. She was no other than Poppy Harlow.

It transpires that years back, Carlson had routinely called into a Howard-Stern-like shock-jock radio show and made naughty comments, some about women. Women were “extremely primitive,” he had quipped. Yet to watch the countless, indistinguishable, ruthless, atavistic women empaneled on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News—one cannot but agree as to the nature and caliber of the women privileged and elevated in our democracy, and by mass society, in general.

They are certainly not women with the intellect and wit of Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864-1945). Would that women like Mrs. Asquith were permitted to put lesser “ladies” like CNN’s Ms. Harlow in their proper place!

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Margot Asquith shot back, “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.” Naturally, you’d have to have a facility with the English language to know what a “harlot” is. You’d certainly need an education, as opposed to a degree, to recognize the next character referenced.

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice. If parents saw to it that children got an education, not merely a degree, the brats would know who Madam Defarge was. But our uneducated ignoramuses no longer seek out the greatest literature ever. This is because most of the best books were penned by the pale, patriarchal penile people. Given this self-inflicted ignorance, few younger readers will know this most loathsome of literary icons, from “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.

Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner who sat knitting as she watched the en masse public beheadings of aristocrats (17,000 of them) in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution, whose symbol ought to be the guillotine. (Another 10,000 perished in prison sans due process.)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shrieked in vengeance on TV when a sentencing Judge, T. S. Ellis III, dared to cite Paul Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life.” Manafort, formerly a Trump campaign adviser, will be jailed for seven-and-a-half years for non-violent “crimes” excavated by Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller, and committed against that most wicked of government departments, the Internal Revenue Service. That a broken, frail, wheelchair-bound man might not die in jail enraged the wicked, pitiless witches of the networks.

Cheered on by our contemporary Madame Defarges, Manafort’s next sentencing Judge, an angry female, failed to limit her ambit to the application of the law, namely to sentencing. Instead, she lectured the defendant for a demeanor that displeased her, and for an inadequate display of contrition. Judge Amy Berman Jackson subjected a visibly broken Mr. Manafort to a vicious tongue-lashing.

For that the TV harpies rejoiced as one.

Not one bit did they care that Manafort had also been subjected to double jeopardy. In contravention of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prosecutors simply tweak or reword an indictment just enough to twice or thrice put a defendant “in jeopardy of life or limb” “for the same offense.”

The cable coven was having none of this compassion stuff (that’s for immigrants who murder Americans, not for elderly white men who had worked for Mr. Trump). Mercy? What’s that! Manafort had stolen from the government, shrieked one NBC harridan (the IRS itself being a thieving, corrupt and oppressive entity).

Undeniably, this reign of terror on TV is dominated by women. And they are as flippant about a new arms race with Russia as they are about jailing individuals for crimes created in the process of conducting a Mueller-like inquisition, with its “storm-trooper tactic” and overweening, extra-constitutional powers. (Is Maria Butina still in solitary, by the way?)

Likewise, the attitude of TV’s females to alleged sex crimes is to drop the word “alleged” and dispatch the accused: guilty! In the lexicon of these feral creatures, whom we watch day-in and day-out gesticulate and fulminate, to be accused of a sex offense is to be guilty of it (unless you are a ruthless illegal alien who’s raped a helpless cow**. Due process? That’s too much of a high-minded abstraction for the average tele-tart.

Then there are the phrases these women deploy and the direction their impoverished discourse invariably leads on the ubiquitous panels:

It’s not normal!

Look at what President Trump just said. Look, he shows more affection toward dictators than democrats.

Look at the “untraditional nations” he is befriending, look at the war he is not prosecuting. It’s not normal. Help. Restrain him. Make him “normal.”

The “not normal” refrain issues from the uterine bowels of the tele-tart. It is a visceral cry for conformity, uniformity of thought at all costs.

Never mind that the path to some kind of unity in this fractured, broken country of ours is through peaceful disunity. That, these radical females consider dystopic. They are unprepared to accept respectful disunity, or accord an opponent respect. It is a fight to the death—though not theirs.

It takes a foreign correspondent planted amid our White House Press Corps to highlight the latter’s dysfunction. During a presser with “Trump of the Tropics”—Brazil’s visiting president, Jair Bolsonaro—a Brazilian lass distinguished herself by focusing exclusively on … hefty matters. When this foreign correspondent asked President Trump about the “OECD,” the furrows on the sloping brows who make up the American press scrum deepened.

To these presstitutes, it mattered not whether America was going to put in a good word for Brazil at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, when there was one overriding, life-or-death matter to tackle: Trump’s irredeemable, unrelenting, absolute awfulness, which not even an exoneration by the sainted Mr. Mueller has ameliorated. Yes, Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election. No, this has not altered a bit the hyperventilating done by the harridans on the ubiquitous television panels.

Let me be clear: When I allude to the women of TV, I include those with the Y chromosome. However, other than a few “men”—Don Lemon and his CNN sidekick, Chris Cuomo, come to mind—the housebroken boys on the typical TV panel are tamer than the tarts. Some of the “men” might even be pretending to be temperamentally unhinged in order to hook-up with good-looking girls in the Green Room.

Brooke Baldwin of CNN and Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC continue to spit out Trump news in CAPS, just so you know HOW EACH ONE FEELS DEEP DOWN INSIDE, AND WHO ARE THE ANGELS AND THE DEMONS IN THE STORY. (Donald and his Deplorables are never angels, if you get the drift.)

Not coincidentally, the asphyxiating hysteria matches the vapid vocabulary. TV’s liberal women rob the English language blind, deploying breathy figures of speech to fit a simpleton’s febrile, emotionally overwrought state-of-mind: “Unbelievable, incredibly embarrassing, amazing, OMG!”

This piss-poor, teenybopper English comes with sound effects. TV’s tarts all speak in insufferable, grating, staccato, tart tones. At least, that is how I have always described the gravelly voice of the tele-ditz. And yet, believe it or not, such a depiction is no longer politically proper. The voices from hell have been dignified. Explains The Economist:

Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry – often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity – happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality.

Mandatory elocution lessons might ease the viewer’s pain.

Bad English and bad thinking are intertwined. By logical extension, the “ladies” resort reflexively to ad hominen attack. If Trump expresses an opinion, it is not because he sincerely thinks it or believes it, but because he is narcissistic, is not nice, makes them sad.

As befits the pedestrian minds described, our pig-ignorant panelists are incapable of grasping the role of government. You see, the tele-tarts focus not on the role of government, but on the tone of government. Thus is disagreement cast as diabolical. Donald Trump dares to dispute the notion that white nationalism is an urgent problem. He has the audacity to dislike John McCain (who is likewise despised by many a Vietnam War veteran), and he is unconvinced a few Russian bots threw the 2016 elections. Trump doesn’t conform. He rejects received opinion. He is not like all those sinecured, empaneled “normies.” The reality of difference among TV’s distaff sets off the kind of uncontrollable twitching and writhing conjuring medieval mass hysteria. St. John’s dance frenzy, 600-odd years ago, for example.

All this is the stuff of tabloids. For the disciplined mind craves data. It craves facts, not folklore. By contrast, devoid of discipline and a sense of propriety, and seeking the warm smell of the Fake-News herd, cable’s cretins escape into gossip, feelings and fantasy.

The girlie nature of news reportage means a lurch from one scandal to the next. And it is rarely about real news. The “Five W’s” journalists are obligated to impart in their coverage no longer count. These were: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Nowadays, the women in control keep it sensational, as opposed to informative and substantive. They pick the most perverse aspect of a story—often entirely imaginary and symbolic—zero in on it and work it, until the next fix presents itself.

Nor are these dames nameless phantoms. Here are some of American TV’s more memorable mediocrities: Yamiche Alcinder (PBS); Ruth Marcus (The Washington Post); Marie Barf, Jessica Tarlov and Rochelle Ritchie of Fox News; Alexis McGill Johnson (pseudo-scholar and “activist”); Jackie Speier (politician); Ana Maria Archila (co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy); Nomiki Konst and Symone D. Sanders (high-flying Bernie babes both); Asha Rangappa (former FBI, ever Democrat); Michelle Goldberg (atrocious writer at The New York Times); Hallie Jackson (MSNBC); Sarah Westwood (snide at CNN); Emma Brown (The Washington Post); Shannon Pettypiece (Bloomberg); Catherine Rampell (The Washington Post); Eliza Collins (USA Today); Maya Wiley (MSNBC); Jessica Valenti (author of Sex Object); Liz Plank (cringe factor infinity at Vox Media); Liz Mair (lite libertarian); Cynthia Alskne (dumps on the Donald for MSNBC); Natasha Bertram (The Atlantic); Anne Rumsey Gearan (The Washington Post’s White House Reporter); Jennifer Horn (AP News); Neera Tanden (former adviser to Barack Obama and Democratic operative); Adrian de Vogue (CNN Court reporter); Laura Coates (CNN); Xochitl Hinojosa (big wig in the Democratic Party); Jay-Newton Small (Time Magazine); Adrienne Elrod. And on and on. Like so many telemarketers, these propaganda-peddling females are interchangeable in opinion and in demeanor.

And here is my modest Swiftian proposal: It so happens that a hero of the left, mass murderer Mao Zedong, once proposed exporting 10 million Chinese women to the United States. In a long conversation with Henry Kissinger at the Chinese leader’s residence, in February of 1973, Mao moaned about “the dismal trade between the two countries.” China was a “very poor country,” said Mao, with “an excess of women.” “Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way, you can lessen our burdens,” Mao pleaded in earnest (for he had no sense of humor).

That is the one and only page America might consider taking out of the Little Red Book—in reverse. Ship the TV Tarts to China. Bomb China with American bimbos. Alas, as soon as one prototypical panelist falls away, like sharks’ teeth, another moves in to fill her slot.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
The Agonist
April 15

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